


Beautiful

by Tammany



Series: The Core Truths [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Consequences, Free Will, Garden of Eden, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 06:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20271139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This is a quick break for a story that's been asking to come out since my very first viewing of the show.Aziraphale, Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Bearer of the Flaming Sword, thinking a whole lot...and making a few choices.Team Free Will is not always all it's cracked up to be.





	Beautiful

If only gate guarding duty were _different_ he would not have done it, he later thought. You stood your position. You stared out across the rolling sand beyond. You cleaned your weapon and sharpened it. You did your training daily.

Behind you, from the earliest days of Earth, Eden ran on, and you saw so little of it.

He’d considered adding eyes to the back of his head, rather like the cherubim had gone overboard with eyes and wings. The little he had seen doing about-face and the like had been beautiful—as beautiful as most of Her works. Beautiful as stars, which he remembered from the time before she started Project Earth. Beautiful as music. And the smell rolling off it: moist and green and rich with the first life since the angels had been formed—even with his back turned to it all, it was bliss.

He’d cheat. Do extra drill just for the excuse to turn around and watch something besides empty sand drifts. Dream up reasons to patrol inside the Garden, just in case anything was damaging the walls or the Eastern Gate: his gate. His responsibility. He spent time working out how anything even could break out.

“If they took it apart, stone by stone,” he thought. “Or had acid stomach juices they could sick-up over the stones, and dissolve it all away…”

Walking in the shade and the green had been so pleasant. Nicer than standing up on the parapet, alone, with Eden forever behind him.

He could hear it all, too. The birdsong! The wind in the branches of the trees—rustling through the palm fronds. Stirring the fern fronds. The cry of wild animals… He wasn’t one of the creator angels, the ones who helped God Herself hang the stars and separate darkness and light and generally make much of nothingness—but he loved what She created so badly it ached, and his life was a constant, desperate prayer of praise and longing.

Give me another job. Let me turn around. Oh, Lord, it’s so beautifulbeautifulbeautiful!

He could hear them talking in the distance sometimes. God and Adam. Adam and Eve. Adam was quite sure of himself.

“This one is ‘lion,’ and his Eve is ‘lioness.’ He is the more handsome. Bigger. Stronger. She is humble beside him.”

The words had set something off in the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. It reminded him of someone he struggled to take peacefully. Ah, yes. Gabriel, who always seemed to think he was one step closer to God than her Principality, when technically he was one rung lower, outranking the Principality only when Heaven was on a war footing.

Adam wanted someone to know she was just a rib. His rib. One more thing Adam got to name.

Poor lass.

Secretly the Guardian hoped she would learn to use her “free will” to tell Adam that she’d quit being a rib, and become a human. He hoped she’d name a few things herself. Make her mark. Teach that pompous git about free will so it stuck. God had given free will to them all—even to angels. Though…

They weren’t supposed to use it. Anything they did that qualified as free will, rather than as doing God’s commandment, was by definition not God’s commandment. You could get in trouble for doing not-God’s-commandment when you were an angel. Big trouble.

(Pride goeth before a fall, the angels had whispered after the war. Pride. That’s what it had been. Not free will—free will was supposed to be good, so long as you used it to let God make all the choices. If you didn’t, it was pride. And sin. And you… Fell.)

She grew up, that Eve. That sweet, smart Eve. There’d been a serpent. Not that he’d seen: he was guarding a stupid gate out onto an empty desert, eyes fixed where God directed them--out over empty sand. The serpent had just tunneled up from Below, no gate involved. It had whispered to his beloved little riblet, and taught her “free will,” and that apples were meant to be eaten, and knowledge was meant to be gained. And his Eve—she Fell. Adam Fell.

(Pride, he told himself, blinking back tears. Pride—that was the problem. Not free will or double standards or rigged games. Pride—they’d been told, after all. But they were young, and had no idea of consequences and they could not conceive of what God would do… He shivered, and tried not to recall the days before the war, and after, and the blazing glory of the Morning Star as he plummeted from Heaven, or the scream of his dark Host as they followed him down.)

But he couldn’t bear it. They’d been judged. And turned out. And he met them at the gate and he made a choice.

“Free will,” he told himself. And he sat them down and explained about free will, and consequences, and about how God gave you free will—but She didn’t really mean it. And he gave them his sword, because from then on there were going to be wild animals. Desperate, hungry wild animals who no longer lay together, lion and lamb, and lived on fruit (never apples, though—remember, never apples) and sunlight and the water of the four rivers of Eden. And Eve was already expecting, knocked up before she knew what hit her. (And the pain, God—why did she have to endure the pain and the danger with no way to say no and make Adam respect it?)

Just yards from where the Eastern Gate let out onto the desert, he ripped a hole in the wall. He handed that big oaf Adam the sword, and guided them through, so they might not be noticed right away and beset with troubles before they’d even learned to use the sword to light a camp fire…

Later, he went back up to the parapet and tried not to sick-up over the edge.

“Free will,” he told himself. “I chose. They needed the sword more than I do.”

But he remembered using the sword on his fellow angels, and standing his position in the war, on the front line, with the best view of the dark Host as it Fell.

He’d given his sword away, the sword God had given him to serve her. He’d given it to the Fallen, even if only to the human Fallen. They had still Fallen, and when they died they would go down, not up.

Pride, he thought, fearing.

God had not yet started preaching forgiveness. That would come later. So now, the Guardian of the Eastern Gate shivered, and watched out over the dunes, from which no enemy would ever come, over a gate that would never be under assault.

That was when the serpent arrived.

He was a comfort. Maybe he was right. Maybe angels—not-fallen angels—couldn’t do the wrong thing. He wasn’t sure. But it was cold at night, in the desert, with no canopy of leaves and moist humidity to hold in the heat: just empty sky and arid air and cold, cold,cold dropping from heaven. And there were wild animals.

He had flinched, when Adam killed the “lion.” He could hear the blow, and it brought back memories he’d tried so very long to forget.

He hadn’t killed anyone, he told himself after the demon left. Not then. Not now. Stricken a few blows in the name of the Lord. Offered compassion to the humans, because “God is good,” and so he tried to be, too. That’s how he chose to think about it. Free will. Choice. That was his choice, and he stood by it.

But that night he opened his wings, and flew across the empty, rolling sands, and he knelt beside “lion.” Like all God’s work, it was beautifulbeautifulbeautiful, with a dignified face split in two, marred by the blood and brains that had oozed out. He stroked the tawny fur. He cried silently as he tried to order the gummed up, gory mane. He held one rigid paw.

“I’m sorry, lion,” he whispered.

He was not a creator angel. He was not a healer. He was a guardian—which was no small thing, even if all you guarded was a Gate into Eden. But he was an angel, and he had other tools besides swords. Better tools.

He reached into himself and remembered “lion” on the dunes, as beautiful as Adam, as precious as Eve. He remembered “lion” whole. He grabbed a miracle…

“Ah,” he said, the pain receding a bit. Then “Aaah!’ as “lion” boiled up off of the sands, alive and hungry, with an ugly memory of not-being that put his temper on edge. The Guardian of the Gate scarpered and took wing, and in the end considered himself lucky that “lion” only ripped the hem of his already tattered robe.

He soared into the night sky, into the clear blackness, wings wide, eyes on the stars. Eden was behind him. No doubt he’d get a transfer soon. Until then—he had a feeling his current job was over. Nothing left to guard here. In the meantime, he could exercise his free will.

He banked and turned, and descended into the Garden, and walked in the night, to the sound of sudden predators introducing lambs to the notion of free will. And, yet…

Still…

Even now…

Oh, it was beautifulbeautifulbeautiful.


End file.
